As I Lie Awake and Wonder
by Remembrance
Summary: This started as a new view on Hermione, and spiraled out of control from there. It's not completely Harry Potter anymore, but I've used no names to make it very objective. I think it would be a wonderful prologue to a long, non-HP story. Take my charac


Sometimes, when I am sitting all alone and very quiet, I let myself listen to their voices. It's never, ever, ever easy to listen to those voices, because they cut my heart, and on special occasions, I find it harder and harder and harder to go back. Nobody else knows that I can hear them. They would think I am crazy, and I know that I am not. I am young, and sensible, and I have a brilliant future ahead of me. I am not one who hears the voices of dead people.  
  


It all sounds very Sixth Sense, does it not? But I can't see them, I don't consider myself haunted, and I am not a boy who cowards in a red tent at every sign of trouble. I am skilled at ignoring, blocking out, and going on about my business. The whole thing has never really troubled me in a physical sense. And yet, I have to admit, sometimes it's so hard to be sensible and clear-headed when they're telling you their sob-stories that no one else can listen to. Not all of them are desperate, tortured souls. Sometimes it's just happy old people who died for sheer number of years, and they often have sweetest, most heart-warming stories to whisper in my ear. Not all of them, but some. Some counts, right?  
  


It scared me at first, this secret part of me that no one knows and still is there. So many times I've passed it off as studying, or fatigue, when it was just the fact that I could hear my friends over the sounds in me. But I think I'm past fear, or even acceptance. It's not a natural part of me, like a nose or a tendency towards alcoholism. It's something totally independent of any rationalism or justification. I do not bode well with things independent of any rationalism or justification. Still, I will never breathe a word of the graveyard alive in my brain. Never in a million years, because that is just a stipulation of the condition. It was this fact that got me thinking.  
  


If there was something in every person, something that was just as common as a nose or a tendency towards alcoholism, and yet it was in a way scary and in a way forbidden and in a way to far in lethologica for any human to deal with, would it stay silent forever? What if my affliction is just a basic human condition, something not spoken of to highest degree? And what if everybody went through life covering up what they think is their very own deepest darkest secret? A bond that links every human together on a large, understanding scale, and it has never been spoken or written or introduced to anything other than the cavernous hole of our dirty musings. What then?  
  


Imagine that every time someone passes you on the street, and they have an impassive look on their face, they are listening to a voice from centuries ago. What if what we call "an impassive look" is really the face of a person hearing the dead? If my theory pulls through, that may be the very chilling truth. I don't know if I really am mad. Mad people have one huge thing in their favor: they must prove themselves to no one. Maybe the mad people really know the truth, and they are just string down at us with patronizing looks in their hearts, when really we are just to basic and incomplete to comprehend and appreciate. Maybe the mad people are the voices. Maybe the voices aren't there at all.  
  


So much talking would confuse anyone, so I'm going to stop analyzing and start taking things at face value. The voices, and the possibly of them being universal. Wherever the situation ends up, I still wake up to horrible shrieking sobs of regret, and then am soothed by a French lullaby sung by a long-decomposed royalty. I still have something in me that has never seen the light of day, and unless I am able to stop thinking sensibly, never will. I am either more different than anyone has ever been, or exactly the same. That is my story.   



End file.
